Riya’s story (in her words)

How can a food that you’ve eaten practically every day of your life be your comfort food? It has to be the greatest love affair, one of 26 years that hasn’t grown stale, but instead is thriving because the partners keep discovering new things about each other, keep adapting to each other’s thousand and one moods.

When my mom first introduced us, Datshi and I, Datshi was this extremely cheesy, but wholesome item that my baby tongue could trust. As the years rolled by, the potatoes joined in, and I started liking Datshi even more. When I grew up and began craving spicy food (partly due to peer pressure), Datshi showed me who it really was – fiery and colorful, it could make you cry and yet make you ask for more.

Datshi has seen me through my highest and my lowest, I have eaten it in my pajamas after a week of being in bed and crying over the world not revolving around me and my plans, I have devoured it after coming back home starved from a party that was celebrating something I had done, it has accompanied me during the several reruns of FRIENDS, and it has kept me warm in faraway places by offering me the aroma and flavour of home.

Can’t fake a love like this, can you? If all this sounds too cheesy, please go ahead blame it on Datshi!

My experience cooking, eating and feeding Datshi:

  1. I felt nervous about making Datshi. How do I make a decent something I have never tasted before? And when you do make it, how do you know if it is well made? Where is your comparison marker?
    Through this love affair, I started dealing with my need to be ‘perfect’ in a predefined way, in the first attempt and quick. It helped me accept a small end of insecurity. So it doesn’t matter what Gordon Ramsay would say about my Datshi, it was perfect for us, R and I.
  2. I made my Datshi from multiple recipes, picking different ingredients and steps from different recipes. From what Riya told me, I realized that a Datshi is what you want it to be. There is so much comfort to be had in that.
  3. I was worried that the Datshi will be too spicy for me and I used that as an excuse to make Tingmo. I had Tingmo when I went to Ladhak a million years ago. I have associated it with joy and beauty.

When I moved away from home for the first time, I did not suffer for food like the others around me did. People missed Ma ke hath ka this and dadi ke hath ka that. I did not miss papa’s no spice vegetables. I was having fun discovering street food that I was not allowed back home.

I remember this one time, in my favorite restaurant, I exclaimed that this, the one I am eating is the best chahapti in the world. To this, my friend said “It’s not! There is no chapati like ma ke hath ki chapati“.

Apart from finding that sexist, I did not know what to feel about this statement. I didn’t remember my ma ke hath ka food, before or after asylum even when I rattled my brain. My father has been the main cook in our household and we got help for chapatis. So I smiled the smile Papa, R and I had perfected for such situations where we were reminded of the loss of mummy while growing up.

It has been 7 years since that incident; 2 years to coming home. I now know the taste of mumma’s chapati, papa’s and R’s. The hotel chapatis win, hands-down but that isn’t the point. I now associate some foods with home. Home kaadhi, khichadi, curd rice, shrikhand will be set the standard against which all other kaadhis, khichadis, curd rices and shrikhans will be judged.

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